365 days of pandemic in Cuba: What have we learned from COVID-19?

HAVANA, Cuba, Mar 11 (ACN) From COVID-19 we must have learned a couple of mostly bad things, but also some good ones, taught in the most horrible way, while millions are dying in the world.

The cause, the effect and the solution are in our hands.

We learned that the virus does not seek us out; we pick it up and carry it around ourselves in very efficient ways. It would be perfect if every one of us took good care of ourselves. It only depends on our conscience. Nothing less.

And yes, conscience works.

Back when we didn’t know who Dr. Francisco Durán was; before the face masks, quarantines and hypochlorite solutions; when the apocalyptic reality was still far away, 60-year-old tour guide Mayra Malvar, despite her comorbidities and with no other protection than her conscience, did what many do not learn to do even in 100 pandemics.

She stopped a tour program and asked around where the tourists had been. Never mind that weather changes cause colds: she took the foreign visitors to a clinic, and thanks to her, COVID-19 was detected in Cuba on March 11, 2020, only three months after the World Health Organization (WHO) announced a local epidemiological outbreak in Wuhan, China.

"I didn't think I was lucky enough to come across the coronavirus. They wanted their tour to go on but I said no," says Mayra, a hypertensive translator and interpreter who works with Italian tourists.

The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reported a cluster of pneumonia cases eventually determined to be caused by a new coronavirus. It was the last day of 2019 and the first day of COVID-19.

We are not as strong as we pretend and think we are.

Some molecules have knocked out humanity, and the new normal is nowhere in sight no matter how much development, power, money, science and technology we have. More than 2.61 million people have died and more than 118 million have fallen ill. In Cuba, 91.5% of approximately 59,000 diagnosed so far have already recovered.

We have also learned that human wickedness outweighs any calamity.

Many of the 240 measures against Cuba taken in two and a half years by the United States under the Donald Trump Administration were enforced during the pandemic. They were designed to obstruct our main sources of income and hinder trade relations, subvert internal order to make the country ungovernable, and discourage foreign investment, travel, personal remittances, medical cooperation, trade, business and tourism, among other purposes. It’s the world’s greatest power against an island at the forefront of the fight against COVID-19 with Cuban vaccines,
pharmaceuticals, protocols and enough doctors to share.

In general, we have learned that we must learn; that what is truly important is not private property or perennial wars or space travel; that good things can be bad too, and vice versa. And above all, given the circumstances, we have learned that the solution is, like fire, like everything else, as usual, in our hands.